Artist: Gordon Stevenson
Title: Construction Site
Date: 1909
Medium: oil on canvas
Stevenson's Construction Site is one of a suite of three murals in the hall outside the Lane Tech library. Margaret Hittle, William E. Scott, and Stevenson conceived of their works as a thematic series linking steel making, construction, and commerce. These were among the forces that drove turn-of-the-century Chicago, then the thriving home of enormous new steel mills, the world's highest skyscrapers, and commercial powers Sears, Roebuck & Company and Montgomery Ward. In his mural Stevenson shows men working within the bold, red lines of shaped steel used to erect a building, bridge, or transit structure. What is being constructed seems less important than the energetic activity of building itself.
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Artist: Mitchell Siporin
Title: Teaching of Literature
from the four-panel mural, Teaching of the Arts
Date: 1938
Medium: fresco
Anyone who entered Lane Tech's majestic auditorium by its main doors in 1938 passed Mitchell Siporin's four frescoes, Teaching of the Arts. The images show allegories of drama, visual arts, literature, and music. Siporin designed his frescoes to celebrate the arts as vital cultural expressions in a democratic society. Each art is made clear through attributes, such as a palette or book, and distinguished practitioners. Teaching of Literature (left) emphasizes the role of the writer as teacher of the next generation, symbolized by young males. Surrounded by trees and grass, Walt Whitman (1919-1892) leads a boy, who holds a copy of Whitman's epic poem "Leaves of Grass," toward an unbounded future.
More Lane Tech murals
Related work in the Art Institute:
Aaron Douglas, Study for Aspects of Negro Life: The Negro in an African Setting
This Aaron Douglas painting showing African dancers in a jungle is a study for a public mural project like those created for Lane Tech.
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